August 2012 archive

YOU might not have noticed, but the face a person makes when they sneeze or yawn is remarkably similar to the one they pull at orgasm. Similarly, being prevented from completing any of these three actions once they are under way is extremely frustrating. Are they linked in their function?

In Curious Behavior, neuroscientist Robert Provine discusses common yet seemingly strange actions, such as crying, tickling and yawning - subjects often overlooked by science. Beyond explaining how each of these actions work anatomically, Provine explores their functions, similarities and whether they might be linked by some higher, social purpose.

The most fascinating chapters involve descriptions of what happens when these behaviours become extreme. Take the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, which affected around a thousand people over several years. Then there is the story of a woman with an itch so severe she scratched through to her brain in her sleep.

Through its theme of “enlightenment”, the ceremony drew parallels between the inspirational efforts of para-athletes to extend the boundaries of human endeavour and the endless scientific quest to extend the frontiers of human knowledge.

In the wake of Curiosity's landing on Mars, artist Kelly Richardson's depictions of a post-apocalyptic Red Planet are a call for us to save our own planet

IT'S 200 years from now, and the sun beats down on a barren landscape of red rock scattered with smashed satellites and dilapidated robots. NASA's battered old Curiosity rover lies wedged on a mound of dirt, its wheels whirring intermittently in futile effort, like an exhausted beetle stuck on its back.

This bleak Mars-scape is the work of Canadian artist Kelly Richardson. Mariner 9, a 12-metre long, hyper-realistic video installation, named after a NASA orbiter, offers a glimpse at a possible reality for the future of humanity on other planets.

In The Ravenous Brain Daniel Bor explores consciousness and suggests that its level of activity is linked to several psychiatric conditions

It is a long-standing philosophical conundrum: is consciousness somehow separate from the physical world or merely an illusion conjured up by our complex brains? It took his father's stroke to convince Daniel Bor which side he was on.

Bor, who had previously been considering a PhD in the philosophy of mind, opted instead for one in the neuroscience of consciousness. To see his father "robbed of his identity because a small clot on his brain had potently wounded his consciousness" hammered home all too well that the mind really is the output of nothing more than a small sac of jelly.

But what an amazing sac of jelly it is. In The Ravenous Brain, Bor takes us on a tour of the fascinating world of consciousness research. He engages in "technological telepathy", taking part in a conversation where he communicates his thoughts using only an MRI brain scanner.

Whether it’s the rise and proliferation of infographics from media buzzword to bestselling book, or the first Data Journalism Awards this year, data visualisation now pervades almost all disciplines, employed and celebrated as a means of conveying information effectively.

It came as no surprise, then, that the topic was turned on its head at this year’s Campus Party Europe in Berlin, Germany. Billed as “the biggest electronic entertainment event in the world”, the festival is a week of tech-related talks and workshops with 10,000 participants - in the words of keynote speaker, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, “a hackathon gone big”.

You’d think that this statement from McKenzie, the author of two series of novels with a genetics theme, would inflame the scientist sitting to her left. But Alistair Elfick, who works in synthetic biology and genetic engineering at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and was a fellow panellist at this week’s "The Scientist in Fiction" discussion at the Edinburgh Book Festival, was full of praise for literature and film that spreads the word about science.

Half a century ago, biologist Rachel Carson wrote a popular science book that exposed the impact of chemical pesticides on the natural environment and stirred fierce debate in society. Silent Spring was a near instant bestseller, and though Carson died less than two years after it was published, her legacy persists; the work helped to launch the American environmental movement and continues to inspire people today.

Silent Spring is just one example of the profound impact of popular science writing. Science is the most powerful tool we have for analysing and making sense of the world, and there is rich history of books that promote its wider understanding. To celebrate this tradition, and to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring in September, we are asking New Scientist readers to vote for the most influential popular science books - by which we mean those that have had the biggest impact on both science and society.

With the help of a panel of distinguished writers and scientists, we’ve selected a shortlist of 25; now we need your help to winnow these to the top 10. In return, you'll get a chance to win a set of all 25 shortlisted books. Read more about them below.

PAIN remains one of the most slippery concepts in physiology. We all experience it, but it is nearly impossible to define in any complete way. That's because measuring it objectively or testing for it is nearly impossible. If you'll forgive the comparison, one could argue that we are closer to "operationalising" love than pain.

In Understanding Pain, Fernando Cervero, professor of anaesthesia at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, gives a remarkably lively tour of what we do know. Although the book is heavily rooted in neuroscience research, Cervero provides a rich and historical backdrop, and layers his explanations with colourful metaphors and relatable examples.

He also tours through all that we still don't understand, including exactly what pain is and why it occurs. There are several different types of pain that appear to have different origins, functions and mechanisms. Sometimes we experience "good pain", which has a protective element, "bad pain" as a consequence of injury or disease, or "chronic pain", which exists for no apparent reason.

In The Human Quest scientist Johan Rockstrom and photographer Mattias Klum make a compelling case for why we need to stay within environmental boundaries

DOZENS, if not hundreds, of books describe the world's environmental crisis and offer prescriptions for a more sustainable future. But only one begins with forewords by former US president Bill Clinton and former Norwegian prime minister and UN sustainability chief Gro Brundtland, as well as other environmental luminaries.

In The Human Quest, Johan Rockström and Mattias Klum deliver a show worthy of this fanfare. Over the past three decades, they argue, our activity has pinned the Earth in a triple squeeze of growing human population, changing climate and failing ecosystems. Of course, environmental Cassandras have been saying that for many years, but Rockström and Klum add a fourth, urgent squeeze. Earth's history is full of tipping points where climates and ecosystems change suddenly, dramatically, and in surprising ways - think ice ages and, at the other extreme, a hothouse Earth with forested poles. Such changes would be catastrophic for human society.

If we want to avoid that risk, they say, we must keep well clear of the tipping points at the limits to growth. That's a radical statement: it is not good enough to keep within the boundaries the planet sets for the human enterprise - we have to leave a buffer zone, too, for safety's sake.

A music-video spoof of LMFAO’s Sexy and I Know It stars NASA’s Curiosity rover, and has quickly become a viral sensation. New Scientist talks to David Hudson, the man behind We're NASA and We Know It.

Your music video about the Curiosity rover that recently landed on Mars has gone viral in the last few days, with more than a million hits on YouTube. How did it all begin?
A group of film-makers and myself, and the company I work for, Cinesaurus, decided that we wanted to start a new YouTube channel and create content each week that was topical and current. A week ago, NASA's Curiosity Mars landing was the biggest thing in the news, and we unanimously decided that was the coolest thing we wanted to make a video for, in addition to the fact that we are just huge science and space geeks.

ONE night in 1987, Ken Parks left his home in the suburbs of Toronto and drove to his in-laws' house, where he killed his mother-in-law and attempted to strangle his father-in-law, before driving to the local police station to hand himself in.

This would, under normal circumstances, have been an open-and-shut case. But the circumstances were anything but normal: Parks's actions that night were all carried out involuntarily, while he slept.

Parks was eventually acquitted and walked free, in a landmark case that led directly to the new field of sleep forensics.

Sleepwalking is one of several parasomnias, or sleep disorders, described by journalist David Randall in Dreamland. Starting with his own sleepwalking episode - which led him to climb out of bed and walk head first into his bedroom wall - Randall weaves his personal story with anecdotes like that of Parks, the short history of sleep research, and the latest findings. He explains why sleep deprivation has become a formidable enemy for the US army; how a short afternoon nap can boost productivity; and how dreams can aid creativity and help us to solve complex problems.

Yet while most of us spend about a third of our lives sleeping, the phenomenon remains largely mysterious. All animals sleep, Randall tells us, but we still have little understanding of exactly why.

Despite these holes in the science, Dreamland is an accessible and well-researched guide to a fascinating subject.

Book informationDreamland: Adventures in the strange science of sleep by David K. RandallPublished by W. W. Norton£17.99/$25.95

Where better to celebrate the promise of renewable energy than in a defunct petrol station?

This weekend, pop science collective Super/Collider are taking over King's Cross Filling Station in London to bring home a hopeful message about our environmental futures. “It’s a great venue for pondering the implications of a post-petroleum city,” says Super/Collider’s Chris Hatherill.

Worldwide, IQs have risen by up to three points per decade over the past century. Known as the Flynn effect, the rise means IQ tests should be recalibrated regularly. At 78, James Flynn, the man it’s named after, explains how he’s still hard at work on its repercussions.

Are we getting smarter? Our ancestors were just as good as we are at practical intelligence, at dealing with everyday life. But our brains and minds have changed over the last century. That is when all these IQ gains have taken place, and we have developed the mental skills needed to deal with the demands of the modern world.

How does that affect our definition of intelligence?Once we understand how our minds have changed, I leave it to you whether you want to say we are "more intelligent". There is no doubt that we need a new approach to the study of intelligence.

Many gifted writers have attempted to translate mathematical thinking into terms ungifted readers can understand. Daniel Tammet's unassuming new volume of essays, reminiscences and stories reveals the enormity of their failure. Thinking in Numbers is unprecedented: a pitch-perfect duet between mathematics and literature. More than that: it is a hybrid. Something new.

Thinking in Numbers reflects Tammet's career-long refusal to accept that mathematical imaginings are somehow special, abstruse, removed from human reality. A synaesthete, a polyglot and a memory man - he once recited pi to 22,514 decimal places, setting a European record - Tammet insists his highly functioning autistic mind is normal. The differences, such as they are, between his thoughts and most other people's are to do with the kind of attention he brings to the world. Numbers have texture, colour and character. Whether we pay attention to these qualities, explore them and enjoy them, is a little bit to do with our genetic inheritance, much more to do with our schooling, and ultimately down to personal choice. All of us think mathematically all the time. To be "afraid of numbers" is a pose, a position, an aesthetic choice, as surely as not "getting" jazz, or condemning this or that kind of art as "rubbish".

The world's most famous living scientist is portrayed as an archetypal lone genius. Could this be harming science, asks Hélène Mialet in Hawking Incorporated

HE IS a household name, and not just in scientific circles. As the world's most famous living scientist, Stephen Hawking needs no introduction - whether appearing on late night chat shows or an episode of The Simpsons. But why?

In Hawking Incorporated, historian and philosopher of science Hélène Mialet sets out to answer this question, and in the process comes to some interesting conclusions about the way we perceive science and scientists.

This book is not a biography. Instead, Mialet says, it is an ethnography that inspects the way Hawking is used in popular culture to explain how we think about science. She argues that it is possible to understand how science is "made" through a detailed study of Hawking the man. But she also makes the case that to do so, we first need to take a closer look at Hawking the myth.

GIULIO TONONI'S charming book Phi is an account of consciousness that nods in its style to the writings of a fellow Italian. Yet while Dante had the poet Virgil to guide him on his journey through the circles of hell in the Divine Comedy, Tononi's elderly traveller Galileo draws on the expertise of three great scientific minds. Journeying into the nature of consciousness he is led by a Francis-Crick-like character, someone who must be Alan Turing and finally Charles Darwin.

Is Tononi trying to tell us that the vast philosophical morass of consciousness - what it is, where it resides, how it arises from a purely physical brain - is a kind of hell? And, like hell, is the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness a place from which few ever return?

In spite of having acquired a vastly improved understanding of the physical, chemical and neuronal structures of the brain, we seem little advanced over the ancient Greeks in our subjective understanding of this mysterious feature of our existence.

It is still the case, for example, that each of us knows we have consciousness but can't be sure anyone or anything else does. Mindful of this, Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, avoids the usual traps and lays out a computational theory that describes consciousness as arising from "integrated information", a quantity he denotes with the Greek character Φ of his title.

Time is running out. It’s nearly midnight, and I’m pacing up and down the platform of the subway station, anxiously looking at my wristwatch. At 12 o’clock, my time will be up. OK, so I’m hardly Cinderella, and my carriage may not turn into a pumpkin, but if I don’t clock up a few hundred more steps before the stroke of 12, I’m not going to meet my daily fuel target, and my personal best will go down the pan.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me rewind. This strange obsession started a few weeks ago after a hedonic weekend at the Secret Garden Party festival in Huntingdon, UK. On Sunday morning I decided to take a breather from festivities and kick back in the Secret Forum tent, host to all manner of talks and offbeat entertainment.

I sat there half dozing behind my sunglasses for a while, as one speaker rolled into the next. Then a trendy-looking young man hopped onto the stage and introduced himself as James Kennedy, a trend analyst from a firm called The Future Laboratory.

Kennedy had come to talk to us about a new trend that he was convinced was going to be huge. In fact, he said, while most trends come and go, this one would only keep getting bigger. What was he so excited about? Self-quantification - the idea of constantly monitoring yourself.

John Maeda, president of Rhode Island School of Design, of one of the US’s most prestigious art schools, wants to turn STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - into STEAM by incorporating art and design.

Why do we need art?Scientists and artists are extremely innovative - it’s just the way they work looks different. The great scientists have models all over their desks; they’re tinkering, playing, ripping things up. And the best artists aren’t sitting there just making; they’re reflecting, thinking, spending years on an idea. STEM to STEAM is a statement about how we believe that STEM will save the economy. But what happens when you focus somewhere is that you lose it elsewhere. Art and design is somehow seen as something lesser. We’ve been positioning art and design closer to STEM and finding synergies. People get excited because someone is showing how the arts can be part of the same pool of knowledge. And unless you can grow all at the same time, where will innovation come from?

Black holes are engines that have driven the universe's development (Image: X-ray (NASA/CXC/KIPAC/ N. Werner, E. Million et al.); radio (NRAO/AUI/NSF/F.Owen))

In Gravity's Engines, astrophysicist Caleb Scharf looks at the tremendous influence of black holes on cosmic development

"WE ARE stardust," sang Joni Mitchell. Caleb Scharf might suggest an update to those lyrics. In Gravity's Engines, Scharf adds a new insight to the half-century-old idea that most atoms in our bodies were born in exploding stars. He argues that some of those hydrogen atoms were likely touched by radiation from black holes - without which we wouldn't be here.

Over the past few decades the scientific discussion of black holes - those whirligigs of space-time that generate gravitational fields so extreme not even light can escape - has progressed from debates over their existence to consensus that they occupy the heart of most galaxies. In Gravity's Engines, Scharf, the director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University in New York, deftly recounts this history and clearly explains the science. But his goal is more ambitious: to show how black holes influenced the evolution of the universe.

Anthropologists believe Homo sapiens started talking around 50,000 years ago - and since then, it seems, we’ve rarely shut up. That explosion of chatter has always given Annie Dorsen pause for thought. “What does it even mean to even produce so much language?” asks the New York-based artist. Her recent stage production, Hello Hi There, is, among other things, an attempt to "take the mystique out of language” by removing the human element.

Beyond the Blue Horizon, Brian Fagan's account of the first intrepid ocean-goers, contains jaw-dropping insights, but they get lost in a sea of repetition

THE oceans are swirling pools of contrast: calm and tumultuous; wine dark and clear; continuous yet disjointed; givers of life and grim reapers combined. For many people, such contrasts make the sea beguiling. There's a romance in the fickleness of water. Like a temperamental lover, its unpredictable behaviour and constant contrast make it all the more seductive.

To an extent, Brian Fagan's Beyond The Blue Horizon reads like the seas it seeks to describe: at once stirring and oddly flat. In it, Fagan sets out to cast light on the often overlooked early voyagers of our seas. The stories of Christopher Columbus and his ilk are well known, but the tales of ancient seafarers - from island-hopping Polynesians to the war-mongering Norse - have mostly been spared the limelight, until now.

Some artists will do nearly anything for their work. Oron Catts, co-founder of the art and science research laboratory SymbioticA, has certainly gone to extreme lengths. “I’ve used my body as an incubator on a few occasions while travelling,” he said, recounting an exhibit for which he transported cell cultures tucked into his underpants on a flight across Australia. The comment garnered chuckles from the small audience gathered at the University of San Francisco this week to hear Catts and a panel of scientists, artists and scholars discuss the state of bio-art and where it might be headed in the future.

In Silicon Valley, there’s no overstating the redemptive potential of technology. Tech can make us happier, wealthier, healthier and luckier. It’s almost like a religion.

It should come as no surprise, then, that this religion has its own rapture: the rapture of the geeks known as the singularity. According to this belief system, faster and better machines (a central tenet is Moore’s law) will beget faster, better machines at an exponential rate, and eventually, the machines will become so powerful that they rival human intelligence. Although there are variations, most people who subscribe to the notion of the singularity believe that when it comes, we will upload our consciousness into a computer and live forever. It will be the death of death.

The chief evangelist of this vision is futurist Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil has serious credentials. He invented the text-to-speech synthesiser, among many other devices. The White House selected him to receive a National Medal of Technology, the highest technology honour in the US. He is in the US Patent Office’s National Inventors Hall of Fame.

He is also famous for consuming up to 150 vitamin pills a day to slow his body’s ageing, so that he will be around to witness the singularity.

The Singularity is Near is a hybrid of documentary and drama, co-directed by Kurzweil, that tries to explain the why and how of its title. Kurzweil’s alter ego, an animated character called Ramona, illustrates the evolutionary arc of thinking machines. She starts out as a primitive, choppy animation but gradually acquires consciousness.